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She came to Cincinnati in 1924 to teach at the all-black Harriet Beecher Stowe School. It was one of the few opportunities for black teachers. She expected a progressive Northern city, but found segregation: whites-only movie theaters, restaurants closed to blacks, Coney Island off limits.

“It was very humiliating to be singled out as a second-class citizen,” Coffey recalled years later.

She had grown up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, alongside Irish-Catholic, Greek Orthodox and white Protestant neighbors, where all the kids got along fine.

“Separation was a concept that was foreign to me,” Coffey said. “I couldn’t see any reason for it. It was clear some things needed to change in Cincinnati.”

Theodore Berry talked her into sticking around and joining the local NAACP chapter. She set herself a new goal: get people to listen to each other, get to know each other and treat each other as human beings.

“The hardest thing in this world to do is like people for what they are – regardless of the artificial barriers of color and worship,” Coffey said.

She left teaching and worked as a secretary and executive at the West End branch of the YWCA. In the 1940s, she started the city’s first Girl Scout troop for African-Americans. The troops integrated within a few years.

In 1948, Coffey was named deputy director of the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, which became the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. She was at the forefront of efforts to desegregate Cincinnati.

Coffey and others lay down at Coney Island’s gate to pressure the amusement park owners to finally allow African-Americans in. She fought the policy of separate days for blacks and whites at the city’s swimming pools. Some white boys climbed onto a shelter roof and poured molasses in her hair.

“I got called every kind of name imaginable,” Coffey said. “But I didn’t become bitter – I never did. Just outraged that black people could be so denied, so mistreated.”

One day a group of white women stormed into the MFRC office in City Hall. Coffey sat them down and listened to their complaints. As homeowners, they demanded “that those colored people be kept out of our pool on our day.”

Coffey told them that she and her husband were also homeowners, and that the pool was theirs, too. The women had no reasonable response to that, so they gave up, and the city pools were opened to all.

In 1968, Coffey became the first woman and first African-American to be executive director of the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. She was recognized with numerous community awards for her work over the years, and died in 2003.

It turns out there was a place for her here. It just needed a little work.

“Cincinnati is slow to change, but when it does, it is solid,” Coffey said. “So much of it is just getting people to talk to each other. When they do, they find they’re not so different after all.”